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My pictures are gone :(

I am so stupid! My computer crashed last week on my 50th birthday and ALL my pictures are gone. I've been talking about backing them up but never did. I have a few on Flickr but only about 30 out of thousands. I've got the computer up and running again. I had to start over with the original factory settings. I was devastated, now I'm just mad at myself for procrastinating. Indulge me as I wanted to look at a couple of pictures that I still have. This is 3 tired boys at “Woofstock”

My son deleted a lot of his art work by mistake and a computer expert managed to get them back. He said you have to turn the computer off straight away or automatically overwrites the supposed deleted things that are now classed as free space. I would start making phone calls and see what can be done.

We had the same thing happen a few months ago - thought we had been backing everything up, but when we looked, nothing had registered for the previous 6 months - I cried all night at the possible loss of so many photos taken during that time!!

However, my OH took the hard drive out of the desktop and discovered an amazing gadget on Amazon which lets you slot the "dead" hard drive into a docking cradle and use it just like any other external drive. We were able to retrieve about 90% of everything, including all our hundreds of photos.

Can't find any documentation about it now, but the gadget says it is "2.5"/3.5" Portable Hard Drive Docking Series and was ordered from www. amazon.co.uk (obviously you would have to have an American equivalent).

Nil desperandum and good luck. Let us know if you manage to get them back and we can have a viewing.

If you have already reinstalled windows then it is likely you have already overwritten some of the pictures. You should definitely stop using it and take it to a computer specialist to try and recover the data for you. I hope you can get them back.